SEATTLE—There’s a scene in the pilot of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” when tech czar Gavin Belson is looking out his office window, watching his minions walk across campus.

“It’s weird,” Belson says to his hovering, fawning life coach. “They always travel in groups of five, these programmers. There’s always a tall, skinny white guy; short skinny Asian guy; fat guy with a ponytail; some guy with crazy facial hair and then, an East Indian guy. It’s like they trade guys until they all have the right group.”

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That scene plays out every day in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, where Jeff Bezos’ ever-growing army of Amazon employees have taken over several city blocks, turning this City by the Sound into a new kind of Company Town.

It’s a moniker that Seattle has embraced before—company town—as far back as the Klondike Gold Rush, and in the last several decades as the home of Boeing, Microsoft and Starbucks. In the case of Amazon, though, that civic embrace hasn’t been given as quickly, or as easily. The city simply can’t get its arms all the way around it.

It was as if one day, Seattle woke up to find that 30,000 new neighbors had moved in, with all the attendant headaches you can imagine: traffic jams, housing shortages and soaring rents. There’s a new, laissez-faire working culture of dressing down and dogs at your desk. Buses are so loaded with so-called “Am-holes” that they rush past stops. Even the dating scene is feeling the rising tide of well-paid, educated men in boyish jeans, sneakers and T-shirts who would rather talk code than meet cute.

Amazon has 15,000 employees in Seattle—most of them engineers, managers and programmers—out of a global workforce of 97,000 and it’s building two new towers in Seattle for another 12,000 workers. The company’s growth and imprint on the city is driven home every time the U.S. Census releases new findings and Seattle shudders at reaching a new milestone it didn’t anticipate, or maybe even want. In the last year, Seattle has experienced the steepest rent hike among U.S. cities. Three out of five Seattle apartments now rent for more than $1,000. To meet demand, whole neighborhoods are seemingly under siege. New construction has bled beyond the tech epicenter of South Lake Union, and up the city’s hills to hipster hamlets where families, non-tech workers and the gay and lesbian community have lived for years, and are now feeling squeezed and priced out.

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Amazon’s is not only a global workforce, pulling workers from all continents, but one of mostly men: Seventy-five percent of Amazon’s workforce is male, to be exact. Their numbers—and their arrival over the last two years—seem to have affected the median income of men in the city. Recent census data showed that median earnings for Seattle men who work full-time increased by $7,000 between 2012 and 2013—a 7 percent jump in just one year. That ranks as the highest pay raise for men in any major U.S. city, and puts men’s median earnings in Seattle at $67,000. Those employed in tech had a median pay of $91,000 last year, and were 79 percent male. Meanwhile, median earnings for women who work full-time in Seattle only went up one percent, census data shows, plateauing at $52,000. Women in Seattle, according to the data, make just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men. That’s down from 86 cents in 2012. So much for progress.

That eight-cent drop represents the largest one-year widening of the gender pay gap among major U.S. cities, and tied Seattle with Tulsa, Okla., as the fifth-worst pay gap in the country in 2013. The best anyone could do at the City Council level was authorize an “action plan” to address the imbalance.

The one area where women would seem to have the upper hand thanks largely to Amazon is in dating. Based on 2010 census numbers crunched by tech writer Jeff Reifman, Seattle has 130 single men for every 100 single women. Reifman, in an article titled “You’ve Got Male: Amazon’s Growth Impacting Seattle Dating Scene,” estimated that by the end of 2014, there will be 86,098 single males aged 25 to 44, but only 66,273 females in the same age range. “If you’re a straight, single woman outside of Seattle,” he wrote, “this might be a great time to move here. Seriously, please move here. Amazon’s hiring.”

But, to use a phrase coined by the women of Georgia Tech, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” In a piece for the website Dame titled “Amazon is Killing My Sex Life,” Tricia Romano recounted her dates with “brogrammers”—men with fat wallets, cool shades and ripped abs but slim interest in anything beyond their jobs and themselves.

“I spent a half hour or more listening to him talk about his job,” Romano wrote in the piece, which ran last spring. “Since I am not in the tech industry, I don’t understand any of it. It was all job speak—the type of language ladder-climbers use; it was the kind of talk that shuts vaginas down cold.”

Seattle’s relationship with other companies that once defined this company town hasn’t always been smooth, although those organizations eventually settled into the community and grew without uprooting those who came before it.

Boeing was started in 1910, when William Boeing bought a shipyard along the Duwamish River and turned it into an airplane factory. By 1967, it had 100,000 employees.